Books were among the firsts articles to be mass produced. The Gutenberg printing press was replaced by the lithography process, and then by offset printing. The goal of these processes and machines was to produce larger runs of, for example, books, magazines, and newspapers. The idea of large runs was central to the way the market developed in the western world: it was imperative to produce large quantities of a single item, so it could be created cheaply enough so as to be distributed all over the world and then sold locally. Mass production was the only way of achieving the goals of low cost, and accessibility through general distribution.
Recent discoveries, however, give us now the possibility of achieving the goals of lower cost and accessibility through a new process which does not involve mass production. Due to the advances in electronic processing of texts, a person can have access to books, magazines, and newspapers, written and edited at a distant location, distributed not by means of paper, but electronically. This newfound capability has prompted many people to suggest that we can do away with paper altogether, and handle all our texts electronically. This has lead to the development of many forms of electronic text processors. However, with respect to books, it is not practical because very few people like to read, for example a 600 page book, on a computer screen. For example, millions of people recently bought paper printed copies of such a book, namely, Sophie's World.
A method of distributing and manufacturing music on cassette tapes is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,528,643 Freeny Jr. Although Freeny Jr. discloses the method for distribution and reproduction of music at a remote location, it does not disclose the apparatus needed to distribute and reproduce books. In addition, Freeny Jr. does not disclose transmitting the music to a remote location in real time in response to a customer's order. In contrast, the Freeny Jr. disclosure requires an information manufacturing machine to electronically store all of the songs a consumer may select at the point of sale location. Accordingly, the selection is limited by the storage capacity of each information manufacturing unit.
The traditional method of producing and distributing books is wasteful. The traditional system requires the publishing industry to print millions of books, newspapers and/ or magazines and then, after the books are produced, seek to sell them. Consequently, very large numbers of those books, newspaper, and magazines go to waste when they are not sold. This waste affects the price of the finished product and, therefore, the consumer must pay for this waste. In addition, the environment is being damaged by this activity.
Typical book binding machines are constructed to satisfy the needs of the publishing industry to produce larger and faster runs. The typical large capacity automatic book-binding systems are very expensive since several machines are required to print and bind a book, for example, an offset (or lithograph) printer, a transportation device for the paper, a paper sheet lifter, a web or collating machine, a folding machine and a thermal binder. To print a book, a very old technique called signature is often used, in which many pages (front and back) of a book are distributed on a large sheet of paper. Each signature holds many pages of the book, half of them head up and half of them head down so that when the large sheet of paper is folded the book pages match. After printing all of the signatures, the signatures are moved along a web, folded, glued and/or sewn. The book receives the cover and it is finally cut on three sides by a paper cutter.
These traditional systems work fine with the large runs of books, however, these systems do not work well with short runs of books which may be sporadic. U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213 discloses an method to make single copies of books. However, the method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213 requires an enormous capacity of digital storage due to the fact that their method uses a raster image (a copy) of the pages of a book. This raster image is acquired by copying a book which has already been printed, for example in the traditional way. As is well known, a raster image (bit-map) is akin to a photograph. These images are then stored in high-capacity optical disks, and the enormous size of an electronic file of the rasterized (scanned) book allows their system to store only a few dozen books per optical disk. Although U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213 mentions the distribution of update information, for example for the index, through a modem, such large electronic files would also require large amounts of transmission bandwidth and time and, therefore, would require a great deal of time to be printed. U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213 does not disclose the transmission of the raster images from a remote location in real time, for example in response to a customer's order. Furthermore, the method disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213 only allows searches of the index and/or description of the book. This is a severe limitation since the contents of the books cannot be searched. The main drawback of the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213, however, is that a physical description of a unique apparatus for the binding and the delivery of the books is not disclosed. It discloses the use of commercially available binding machines which may or not work with the proposed system. In addition, the disclosed binding method uses thermal binding, which can release fumes that can be harmful to living beings. Accordingly, addressing the fumes released during thermal binding can be expensive. Most importantly, the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,213 concerns the reproduction of books which have already been printed and, therefore, does not avoid the necessity of an original printing of the books by the traditional methods.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,547,176, provides for an apparatus to copy (scan) a book and print the scanned images onto loose pages, and a method to bind those loose pages together by means of folding the sheets into semi-signatures and holding them together with a metal clasp. The disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,547,176 requires the scanning of pages of a book already printed and creates images stored in inflexible bitmapped graphics. In addition, the binding process requires a metal clasp to hold the signatures together, making it uneconomical.